Workers are quite often covered for their health insurance by their employers through group health insurance plans which allow for much lower costs. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was a legislation passed in 1996. Its main idea was to ensure continued healthcare coverage for workers even when they changed jobs. Quite often, earlier, workers were not very sure about their health insurance portability and the fact that they would likely lose the benefits of group health insurance if they moved out of their present jobs. This “quite often” led them to lose good opportunities for advancement. HIPAA mainly addressed this concern and allowed for portability of their health insurance to their new locations and jobs.

Health insurance portability has ensured that healthcare coverage is expanded and available to workers irrespective of their employer. The accountability part of the act has led to federal supervision of private health arrangements and overruled state laws in many cases. Health care costs have been reduced because of the fraud and abuse provisions in the Accountability Act, which has made penalties for such fraud and abuse much stiffer. This ensures that health care providers are careful when asking for claims adjustments.

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has been designed to reduce waste in the delivery of health care. It promotes the use of medical savings accounts and access to long term health care services. It is also designed to greatly ease the administration problems concerned with health insurance. This is done by a provision called Administrative Simplification, which encourages maintaining medical records in electronic form and also establishes national standards and identifiers for all health care providers. This ensures that portability of information required when a worker changes his job is done without any problems. While maintaining these electronic records, care has also to be taken to ensure the privacy and security of such information so that it is only available to those authorized to access such information. The standards set for retaining such information would allow such data to be used by all identified health care providers irrespective of their location.

The act further provides that all identified health care providers would maintain all records in standardized formats and ensure that records are constantly updated so that there is never any delay in health care which could result from records that are not updated. All these provisions greatly improve the health care that is available and allow workers to expand their health care insurance needs through medical savings accounts or other means. Health care providers have to be identified and obtain their identifiers based on standards laid down.